Tag Archives: The Feminist Press at CUNY

Happy Pride Month! Being a part of the LGBTQ community means supporting each other through the good times and the bad, embracing our differences and complexities, and making those unheard voices heard. From a trans teen romance to a queer space opera, we’ve pulled a list of 10 great #OwnVoices LGBTQ reads to last you through Pride Month and the rest of the year.

Speaking of LGBT history, from the Stonewall riots in the 1970s to the very first Gay Pride reception hosted by President Obama in 2008, Mark Segal has seen it all. He made his first appearance on the national stage of the LGBT rights movement on December 11, 1973, when he crashed a live broadcast on CBS and yelled “Gays protest CBS prejudice!” Needless to say, his memoir, And Then I Danced: Traveling the Road to LGBT Equality, is one of the most fascinating things you’ll read all year. His experiences and achievements are unbelievably impressive, but Segal relates them all without a hint of braggadocio, speaking candidly and simply as he does. (Segal’s memoir also won the 2016 Excellence in Book Writing Award from the Association of LGBTQ Journalists, if you need further proof of the power of his work.)

Watching the movie Blue is the Warmest Color is an LGBT rite of passage, but have you read the graphic novel that started it all? Like the movie, the book tells the story of Clementine, a shy, in-the-closet teenager who becomes captivated by the confident, blue-haired Emma. This marks the start of a passionate and tragic romance charged with all of the energy, naivety, and hopefulness of youth. Julie Maroh works in stunning watercolor and ink illustrations that bring a soft, dreamy quality to this iconic love story. Her art is even more cinematic and emotive than the movie. Warning: you will cry.

Clocking in at just 150 pages, God in Pink proves that novels don’t have to be massive epics to pack a powerful punch. Our protagonist, Ramy, is a university student in war-torn Iraq who finds himself caught in between his desire to explore his sexuality and his desire to please his brother, a conservative (and homophobic) Muslim. After the death of his parents, the pressure mounts for Ramy to find a wife. Desperate for a way out, Ramy seeks advice from a sheikh at the local mosque, and is forced to untangle contradictions between his life, his religion, and his culture. Namir uses simple and beautiful language to dive into the world of dreams and reality, using touches of magic and Islamic canon to give the reader a deeper understanding of Ramy’s struggle. This book is poignant, timely, and will resonate with anyone who has tried to reconcile who they are with who the world wants them to be.

Nochita is a queer coming-of-age novel like you’ve never read before. While lots of LGBT fiction centers around a coming out story, Nochita examines self-discovery of another kind. The novel focuses less on the titular protagonist’s sexual identity, which is never given a bright-line definition, and more on Nochita’s attempts to carve her own place in the gritty underbelly of California’s counter-culture, after the realization that the adults in her life are incapable of raising her themselves. LGBT people old and young will hear notes of themselves in Nochita’s story, which is full of yearning, ferocity, dark humor, and all of the mistakes (and victories) of youth. Straddling the line between poetry and prose, Felix’s writing is medicine for the soul. It’s lyrical without becoming overly sentimental; poignant without becoming didactic. Nochita is a book you’ll want to pass on to every other queer person you meet.

An Obie-award winner and Tony nominee, Justin Vivian Bond has been shattering ideas of gender in the performance world for over thirty years. Bond’s memoir, Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High-Heels, zooms in on Bond’s childhood, tuning a keen focus into what it means to grow up queer and trans in a small town. Despite dealing with complex issues like discovering sexuality, power dynamics, and childhood bullying, Bond’s writing maintains a certain kind of levity, a finely executed whistling in the dark. Bond is characteristically candid throughout, and reading Tango feels as though Bond has gathered us the readers around a fireplace to share a story and a laugh. Oh, and in case you needed more convincing, this book was blurbed by Yoko Ono. Yeah. That Yoko Ono.

A teenage superhero story written by a trans woman featuring a crew of misfits battling evil in a futuristic dystopia? Paying attention now? In Scout’s city, there’s only one way to get justice: you have to do it yourself. But Scout’s first foray into vigilante-ism doesn’t end quite the way she imagines, and she gets knocked unconscious. When she wakes, she discovers that she can transform into a powerful superhuman creature: Shadoweyes. Campbell’s art and writing are addictive; it’s impossible to just read one page. Though it’s a dystopia, the world Campbell creates is full of eye-popping colors and characters with personalities as vibrant as their designs. Shadoweyes also has quite the spectrum of individuals: it’s got characters of color, disabled characters, queer characters, and even an intersex character. In short: read this book. You won’t regret it.

Elisha Lim is an artist who believes that comics shouldn’t be reserved for straight, white, or cisgender experiences. 100 Crushes is a compilation of five years’ worth of queer comics, a mix of memoir, interviews, tributes, and more. Lim alternates between profiles of “gender rebels” they admire and shorter, more intimate personal anecdotes. Along the way, Lim experiments visually with everything from patterns and textures to fonts and story structures. 100 Crushes reads almost like a diary, as if Lim is inviting us to come along on their journey to discover what it means to be butch, femme, binary, non-binary, and, above all, a queer person of color in a world that centers and normalizes whiteness.

Singer Dusty Springfield was a cultural icon of the 1960s, and not only for her soulful pop sound and flamboyant performances. Springfield was the first female entertainer to publicly come out as bisexual (an admission that was nearly unheard of at the time) and was an anti-racism activist (having been deported from South Africa for refusing to play segregated audiences during apartheid). In Dusty: An Intimate Portrait of a Musical Legend, Karen Bartlett cracks open the shiny persona that Springfield cultivated on stage to take a closer look at Springfield’s inner life, and the struggles she encountered while coming to terms with her sexuality. Dusty: An Intimate Portrait of a Musical Legend combines Bartlett’s meticulous research with new interviews with Dusty’s friends, lovers, employees, and confidants. If you’re looking to brush up on your LGBT history this Pride (or just love a good story), this is the perfect place to start.

Aster has known no life other than the HSS Matilda, a ship that has spent generations carrying the last of humanity to a mythical “Promised Land.” Her dark skin marks her as a sharecropper, the lowest of the low. Add in obsessiveness and a reclusive tendency, and Aster is considered a freak at best, inhuman at worst. Is there a way out of this impossible life? The answer, Aster finds, may lie in the past of her mother, who died from suicide over twenty years before. For a science-fiction novel full of starships and faraway planets, An Unkindness of Ghosts is unflinchingly real. Solomon says that the inspiration for An Unkindness of Ghosts was the question, “How do I go on?”, a peek into the ways in which oppressed people survive and thrive against all odds. World-building has been called Solomon’s main strength in An Unkindness of Ghosts, but it’s hard to pick out any one facet of the book as the best. Solomon’s writing is lush and heavy with layered meaning, but the prose never weighs down the plot or keeps it from racing onward. Like Solomon themself, the protagonist, Aster, is a queer, intersex, neurodivergent person of color, giving this book crucial #OwnVoices representation. In addition, the cover for this book should be nominated for “Most Gorgeous Cover of All Time.” All other covers can go home.

Sonia Patel made a splash last year with her debut young adult novel, Rani Patel in Full Effect, which hit eight different “Best Books of 2016” lists and was a finalist for an ALA Morris Award. Now, she’s back with Jaya and Rasa: A Love Story, the transgender, Gujarati Indian Romeo and Juliet of your dreams. Jaya, a seventeen-year-old trans boy, comes from a wealthy family who is rich in money, privilege, and secrets. On the opposite side of the tracks, Rasa comes from a poor family, raised by a single mother who cares less about her children than the endless parade of men she uses and loses. When their two worlds collide, Jaya and Rasa find that they just might be the family they were always looking for. No one writes teenagers quite like Sonia Patel. By day, Patel is a practicing child psychologist, and her background shows: in her writing, she deftly navigates both trauma and healing to create a startlingly real portrait of mental health. Preorder this book now, so you have it right away when it publishes in September.

The Neil the Horse comic ran for nearly thirteen years in Canadian newspapers, making author and illustrator Katherine Collins a bit of a legend. Every issue and comic strip are compiled for the first time in The Collected Neil the Horse. This is comics like you’ve never seen them before; not just memorable characters going on wacky adventures, but a completely innovative mélange of forms reminiscent of the multiplicity of vaudeville, from crossword puzzles to joke pages and more. The characters spontaneously burst into song and dance, and each comic in the collection comes with sheet music, because Collins isn’t just an artist, she’s a composer and a low-key genius. While the comics don’t technically feature any queer characters, they’re campy, fun, and full of musical theater, all written by Collins, a trans woman, which is just another reminder how creative the LGBT community is.

In 1970, activist and professor Florence Howe founded The Feminist Press in the dim light of her living room, with a singular goal in mind: the press would produce textbooks and volumes of critical theory for the brand-new field of women’s and gender studies. In addition to new works, Howe wanted to fuel the second-wave feminist movement by reprinting out-of-print feminist classics, from Zora Neale Hurston to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Now, the press is its own feminist icon, and this week the American Bookseller’s Association highlighted them in a Small Press Profile.

The Feminist Press’s commitment to social justice on all fronts, not just the literary, is backed by its powerful history of executive directors, including Gloria Jacobs, the former editor of Ms. magazine. Jennifer Baumgardner, the current publisher, is determined to maintain the revolutionary momentum towards equality that The Feminist Press is known for.

“We are really alert to the voices that may be so marginalized that a mainstream press either wouldn’t know to value them or know how to handle them,” Baumgardner told the American Bookseller’s Association. “And then, secondarily, we’re a nonprofit publisher with an educational mission, so we try to build social justice programs and platforms around the books that lend themselves to it — which is a lot of them — to essentially shift the culture.”

What does that look like in practice? One example is a project called “The Corrective Canon,” in which authors from marginalized and intersecting identities take on literary classics by dead white men and reclaim them for a new, contemporary canon. The first volume of this project was published this spring. Sarah Schulman’s The Cosmopolitans is a queer retelling of Balzac’s Cousin Bette. The Cosmopolitans has been in bookstores for barely over a week, but the novel is alreadyreceiving explosive attention from the media. It’s been praised by the Slate blog Outward, Ms. magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and dozens more. The April/May 2016 issue of Bookforum gushed that Schulman’s novel is “an extraordinarily radical and risky experiment that seizes on what you thought you knew about the period . . . only to chop it up and reassemble it in jarringly unexpected shapes.”

The Feminist Press also believes in activism for all ages. Their children’s book series, “Ordinary Terrible Things,” intends to give children an age-appropriate lens through which to comprehend things like abuse, death, and divorce. The second book in the series, Death Is Stupid, discusses mortality with kids in a way that leaves out unnecessary sugar-coating and condescension.

Going forward, Baumgardner says we can look forward to more of the same – which, in this case, means more consistent metamorphosis.

“We need to keep lifting up some of the most important feminist voices writing today, rather than just the people you are used to hearing from,” Baumgartner says.

Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and hundreds upon hundreds more. Throughout history, African American men and women have been pillars of both classic and contemporary literature, making us breathless and boundless with their revolutionary poetry and prose.

In a survey conducted by Publishers Weekly in 2014, it was revealed that 79% of those who work in the publishing industry were white. In 2012, Roxane Gay published an article disparaging the fact that 88% of books reviewed by the New York Times are written by white authors. In a world still reeling from police murders in Ferguson, New York City, and Minneapolis (among countless others), it becomes clear that we are very much still in the middle of a civil rights movement. It is crucial to amplify black voices and support black lives in the middle of this struggle.

In celebration and in solidarity, for Black History Month we offer a roundup of radical poetry, stunning prose, and crucial critical social theory by African American authors.

The Breakbeat Poets(Haymarket Books), edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh A. Lansana, and Nate Marshall, is a first-of-its-kind anthology of hip-hop poetica written for and by the people. The book challenges the notion of what poetry is and who is allowed to access it, breaking down the Ivory Tower to discuss how hip-hop, an art form created by African Americans, revolutionized a genre.

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books), by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, analyzes the roots of the Black Lives Matter movement and its potential to reignite a broader struggle for Black liberation. Beginning with the mass protests of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, activist and scholar Taylor discusses how the Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new generation of activists. This book is available starting tomorrow!

African American Women (GILES), a collection of photographs from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, with a foreword by Lonnie G Bunch, is the third book in the NMAAHC’s “Double Exposure” series. This volume contains stunning photographs which demonstrate the dignity, joy, heartbreak, commitment, and sacrifice of women of all ages and backgrounds, from midwives at work in the rural south to students jailed for civil rights protests.

But Some of Us Are Brave (The Feminist Press at CUNY), edited by Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, is the first comprehensive collection of black feminist scholarship, the call for an academic revolution. Audre Lorde praised this book as “Exciting! Affirmations and the beginning of a new era, where the ‘women’ in women’s studies will no longer mean ‘white.'”

Tales (Akashic Books) is a collection of short stories by Amiri Baraka. In the Philadelphia Tribune on February 5, noted American historian, literary critic, and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates Jr. said, “We owe profound thanks to Akashic Books for reissuing this important collection of Amiri Baraka’s short stories. . . . Baraka was, without question, the central figure of the Black Arts Movement. . . Tales is a critical volume in Amiri Baraka’s oeuvre, and an important testament to his remarkable literary legacy.”

The Book of Harlan(Akashic Books), by Bernice L. McFadden, is a novel detailing the stories of two African American musicians captured by the Nazis in Paris during WWII and imprisoned at the Buchenwald concentration camp. From an author praised by NPR and an editor’s choice at the New York Times Book Review, The Book of Harlan is a powerful meditation on the past, present, and future of civil rights. Stay tuned for this book, which releases this May!

Freedom is a Constant Struggle (Haymarket Books) is a collection of essays, interviews, and speeches by world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis. Reflecting on the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movements, Davis champions the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today’s struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. Davis challenges all of us to imagine and build a new movement for human liberation.

Find out where to buy The Breakbeat Poets, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, African American Women, But Some of Us Are Brave, Tales, The Book of Harlan, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, and many more books here at the Consortium website.